


the education of our heroes

by forsanethaec



Category: Social Network (2010)
Genre: 1950s, Alternate Universe, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Boarding School, Classics, Dead Poets Society - Freeform, Literature, M/M, Poetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-21
Updated: 2012-08-21
Packaged: 2017-11-12 14:12:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/492049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forsanethaec/pseuds/forsanethaec
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Okay,” Mark says, breathless. “I, um. What do you guys want to do?” “Learn!” someone yells, and everybody laughs. (A loose Dead Poets Society AU. I promise it is not as sad as the movie.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	the education of our heroes

**Author's Note:**

> Happy birthday, [Molly](http://notoriousbfg.tumblr.com/)! I told you I'd finish this someday. So, my classics degree rears its ugly head again. This is kind of like if my Socrates AU had been a boarding school AU except with less character death?? Cool. Totally unbeta’d. Warning: gratuitous excerpting of poetry ahead (with a guest appearance by my username).

I.

Come then, and let us pass a leisure hour in storytelling, and our story shall be the education of our heroes. 

(Plato, Republic Book II)

The trees are different at Welton than in Miami. Eduardo notices it first thing every year like it's new. Fall comes sooner in New England, and the little bite in the air, like a reminder: _you're back_. His father keeps his jacket on and the car windows rolled up, but that doesn't mean much.

There are still plenty of parents crowding the hallways when his own pull away down the drive. Eduardo stands in the front doorway watching them go. He rubs his shoulder half-unconsciously in the place where his father had laid his hand and told him, "This is an important year, Eduardo." Had told him, looking hard into his eyes, "And I know you'll do everything right." 

Yes, sir, Eduardo thinks, face flat. The car rounds the short stone gates, and he turns on his heel and heads back toward the dormitories, loosening his tie a little as he goes. 

Tyler and Cameron pass him going the other way down the stairs. 

"Welcome back, Sav," Tyler calls over his shoulder, smiling crookedly. 

"You too!" Eduardo stumbles backward on the landing for a moment as he turns to grin at them. Cameron salutes, two fingers to his temple, and Eduardo bows with a flourish and trips around the corner in a tangle of long legs. He breaks into a jog as he weaves through the clumps of boys and parents crowding the dorm hallway, hopping over the odd wayward trunk and bumping shoulders or slapping hands with classmates in greeting as he passes. 

It's quiet in his room as he pulls open the door against the move-in clamor and shuts it behind him, breathing out into the sudden dusty hush. The hallway noise presses muffled up against the other side of the white plaster wall. Eduardo slots his hands against the chair rail, familiar dark wood worn against his palms. 

The new boy is sitting at his desk, reading. He had glanced up momentarily when Eduardo had opened the door, looking back down again by the time he'd closed it, not like he's shy precisely but more dismissive. 

"Hi," Eduardo says, pushing off from the wall. He gets no response, and he frowns slightly, bemused. "Hey," he says, "you're new, right?"

The kid looks up at him. His gaze is cool and appraising, brittle, entirely closed off, and Eduardo is momentarily taken aback.

"I guess we're roommates." He smiles determinedly. "Eduardo Saverin." He sticks out his hand.

The boy looks at it, then back up at Eduardo's face, one curious eyebrow quirking. "Mark Zuckerberg," he says, and grasps Eduardo’s hand briefly.

"So you just transferred here?" Eduardo asks. His things are already stacked around his bed, and he starts shifting them around at random, the motions of unpacking with none of the motivation. 

"Yeah." 

"Are you a senior?"

"Yeah."

“Yeah, me too.” Of course they’re the same year, but Eduardo’s just talking to talk. Mark doesn’t say anything, doesn’t seem inclined to keep the conversation going at any turn, and Eduardo can already feel the strain from engaging him. But there's something that makes him want to keep trying. He doesn't know what exactly. Maybe it's a soft spot for lost causes, or maybe an abortive kind of fascination with the immediacy of this boy's tight-wired strangeness, his unapologetic disinterest so different from the social mores Eduardo's used to, where everyone plays along. 

"Are your parents gone already?"

Mark nods, then glances back at his book before closing it with a snap. Eduardo could see some testiness in the deliberate way he does it, maybe, but he chooses not to. Mark turns his chair to face Eduardo’s side of the room, sitting awkwardly in it, half-leaning back but still stiff in the shoulders. His palms smooth over the knees of his pants, picking at a loose thread. 

“They’re driving,” he says, then adds, “Long Island, it’s not far,” over the question on Eduardo’s lips. 

“Was that where you went to school before?” 

Mark nods again, regarding Eduardo inscrutably without saying anything. 

Eduardo chews on his lower lip for a moment, then turns back to his things busily.

“So what do you do?”

“I dunno,” Mark mutters. He looks down at his fingers spread spider-like on his thighs. “What do you do?” 

“Get perfect grades and then go to Harvard to work toward my MBA,” Eduardo says automatically. The words are hollow, like always. Mark quirks an eyebrow again. It’s a funny thing to do with your face, Eduardo thinks, an unfamiliar gesture. It’s like Mark’s trying to say he’s interested because he thinks he ought to, but he also wants you to know at the same time that he’s really not that interested at all. 

He starts, “That sounds,” then stalls, casting around for the words.

“Soul-killingly dull?” Eduardo supplies. 

Mark smiles – a twist of his mouth, at once sweet in the boyish curve of his jaw and a little unsettling in his eyes, a chilly, churning grey-blue the color of a storm at sea. Eduardo likes it, because it’s imperfect and different and rewarding, and he wants to see it – make it – happen all the time. 

They look at each other, and the air goes still for a sudden moment. Then Eduardo’s face splits in a grin, flushing into his cheeks. Mark watches him, appraising, his smile still half on his lips. 

“I want to be a scientist,” he says, an easy, warm confession, one he cherishes. “I, um, I like meteorology.”

“Like you’d be a weatherman?”

“No.” Eduardo chucks the thin paperback he’s holding in his aimless unpacking at Mark’s head. Mark ducks to the side, easily. The book – a Latin dictionary – hits the wall and flops down to the floor. “Like, I don’t know, I want – I’d like to study it.” He purses his lips, looking back at the luggage on his bed. “But my father—”

He was going to say _won’t let me_ , but it’s stupid, because he can do whatever he wants, and he knows this, he does. It’s just early in the year to be thinking this way. Funny how Mark seems to be bringing it out in him, not ten minutes after they’ve met. Maybe it just means it’s close to the surface of Eduardo’s mind regardless. 

“What,” Mark prompts after a moment, and Eduardo realizes he’d forgotten to finish his sentence. He turns. Mark is looking at him, frowning. He seems genuinely interested now, and it’s astonishingly gratifying to have his attention, the surprise hitting Eduardo like a shock of cold air. He gets the sense that Mark’s attention is a commodity not easily shared. 

He shrugs. “He just wants me to go into business. Like him.”

Mark’s frown deepens slightly, tugging cartoonishly at the corners of his mouth , but he doesn’t say anything, and Eduardo lapses into unpacking in earnest for a moment, putting books on the shelves and dropping blank composition books into the drawers of his desk.

“I like classics,” Mark says from behind him. Eduardo turns. Mark’s face is pinched in apparent confusion, like he’s caught off-guard by what he’s saying. Then he looks up at Eduardo. “Greek… Greek lit. And, and some Latin – I mean, lyric–” He ducks his head. “I don’t know.” 

“No, that’s –” Eduardo blinks, and smiles, shaking his head a little. “Yeah. Wow.”

“What,” Mark says, looking up at him from beneath his knit eyebrows.

Eduardo shrugs. “No, it’s – I just wouldn’t have guessed.”

“Ditto,” Mark says, that little smile ghosting through his lips again. Eduardo flushes.

  
II.    


  
Tend us—  
we seem in ruins now, I know. Up from nothing  
rear a house to greatness.    


  
(Aeschylus, The Libation Bearers)    
  


Eduardo learns quickly that Mark doesn’t like to talk about himself, what he’s interested in, what he likes. He brings him around with all the other boys and Mark sits folded into his own body, wearing the convex curve of his ribcage like armor, his mouth a thin line. He speaks, a little, but Eduardo gets the sense that he wants to feel everyone out before he commits too much of himself. He’s different with Eduardo. Perhaps the shelter of privacy, the quiet enclosure of their room lending him a candor he’s not prone to.

“So, Mark. Eduardo tells me you’re a _classicist_ ,” Dustin says to him with a delicate stress on the word, bridging his hands together in the posturing of serious interest. It’s the second day of class, and they’re all grouped up in the corridor waiting for English to start. Dustin is perched on a desk that’s been left up against the wall. 

Mark flicks his eyes up at him from his notebook, which he’s just staring at, not writing anything. 

“Yeah,” he says after a moment in which Dustin just looks at him with interest. A few of the other boys snicker, though not unkindly. 

“Why?” Dustin asks with genuine interest. 

Mark shrugs a bit standoffishly. “I think it’s important,” he says. “The ancients. I think they –” he glances around with his eyes narrowed, finally lingering on Eduardo, like he’s trying to decide how much to give up. Then he lifts his chin. “I think there’s a lot we can learn about ourselves from the Greeks. And – from poetry.” He says the last word reluctantly, like he knows they’ll be taken aback by it. 

“Like what?” Eduardo says. Everyone glances at him, but he has eyes only for Mark. 

“Like how to live… deeply,” Mark says. “I don’t know. Their culture was so more unified than ours. And they placed emphasis on different things.”

“Like discus,” Dustin says with a lopsided grin. There’s no bite behind it, but Mark still regards him coolly for a moment before his mouth twitches in a smile. 

“And fart jokes,” he says, deadpan. Everyone laughs. Eduardo lets out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding.

“Well,” Dustin says, clapping his hands and hopping down from his desk. “Some appropriately heavy thoughts to get us in the mood for another one of Mr. Nolan’s _scintillating_ lectures, I’d say,” and everyone laughs. Dustin is a clown. He can always be counted on to bring a necessary levity to their dealings at Welton, which can stray easily into the terminally boring. 

“What’s wrong with Mr. Nolan,” Mark mutters to Eduardo as they gather up their things.

“Oh, nothing,” he says, “only I think you just had stronger feelings about literature in five seconds than Nolan or anyone in his class has in five years.” 

Mark’s mouth twists, wry. 

Eduardo fits a hand briefly at the small of his back as they file into the classroom, unsure why he’s doing it, only that he wants to. He doesn’t say anything, and Mark glances at him before letting it happen, leading the way. 

Later, in their room, he feels like he can ask about it. 

“That was – what you were saying with Dustin. Before English.” 

Mark’s at his desk, chair tipped back against the wall with his history book propped ineffectually on his knees. “Yeah,” he prompts, when Eduardo can’t seem to figure out how to continue. 

“So, you really care about this stuff,” Eduardo says finally.

Mark shrugs, considering for a moment, before he speaks.

“Nietzsche has this great essay about the Homeric question, you know, whether Homer’s work was written by a lot of people together in succession or by one man on his own, where he says that poetry like that can’t be the product of the individual will because it’s too weak. So poetry ends up being – the soul of the people. Of _a_ people. Collective will, you know, and you get that in the Greeks, this kind of – drive to creation, to the ecstatic? And they didn’t shy away from what was ugly. It was a part of it. That’s what the Greeks were about.” 

He says all this very quickly, and when he’s done his eyes slide into focus on Eduardo like he’s forgotten he’s there. 

“I think we forget about poetry,” he says, low, “what it’s really about, sometimes.” 

Eduardo blinks. “That’s so interesting.”

Mark shrugs again.

“No, it is.” Eduardo grins. “Shit, you should teach Nolan’s class.”

Mark’s head kind of snaps up at that, and Eduardo raises his eyebrows. “I mean, I’m kidding. I think. Maybe?”

Mark chews on his lower lip for a moment, and then his mouth tugs up at the corners into a conspiratorial grin. It lights up his face kind of eerily, like he’s holding a flashlight under his chin, and Eduardo has to suppress a sudden shiver.

Deliberately, Mark closes his history book and leans forward in his chair.

“Have you ever read anything by Aristophanes?”

  


III.  


  


I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately… and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.  


  


(Henry David Thoreau, Walden)   
  


They meet after midnight that Thursday in a hollow just past the edge of the grounds that’s part dirt cave, part the inside of a great gutted tree. It’s spooky and there’s a mist in the air and it’s an absolutely perfect setting for breaking the rules.

Mark looks like he’s having trouble maintaining an aloof exterior when he sees how many boys show up. Dustin is there, and Chris, and even Cam and Tyler hovering at the fringes, looking appraising. 

“Okay,” he says, breathless. He’s crouched at the head of the group, the rest of them hunched in the rough approximation of a circle inside the low space. Eduardo glances over the determined lines of Mark's face, his carriage like a diver on a springboard. “I, um. What do you guys want to do?”

“Learn!” someone yells, and everybody laughs. The sound dies quickly in the cloistered space, and the silence it leaves is pleasantly frightening, like a good ghost story.

“We need a pledge or something,” Dustin says, “something to say at the beginning of – whatever this is.” There are assenting murmurs and some anticipatory chuckles all around.

“Okay,” Mark says again, licking his lips. “There’s – we could do—” he seems to cast around for a moment. And then his face actually lights up, and Eduardo’s chest warms with it, seeing the moment of discovery pure and overwhelming. He scribbles something down on the inside cover of the thick anthology of ancient verse he’s brought with him.

“Sappho,” he says when he looks up at them. “We can do Sappho.”

“Wasn’t she a girl?” someone calls.

“Wasn’t she a _lesbian_?” Someone else. The peanut gallery titters.

Mark shakes his head, brushing it off with a scoff on his mouth. “Does it matter? All those old poets – once you’re dead it isn’t about you, it’s about what you created. Here. Listen.” He swallows, Adam’s apple bobbing, and Eduardo knows he must be more nervous than he’s letting on and he admires him for it. 

“‘Although they are only breath, words which I command are immortal,’” Mark intones. 

There’s silence for a second, and then lets out a low whistle. A murmur of laughter passes around the circle again, like a ripple. Mark is practically glowing. 

“We need a name,” Eduardo says. His voice catches even him by surprise in the charged silence. Mark’s eyes tick over to meet his.

“The Dead Poets Society.” He says it automatically, like he’s always known it, and his voice is quiet but carrying, filling up the whole space until there’s nothing but the collectively baited breath of the boys gathered there and the low, pulsing energy of Mark’s eyes, like he’s electrified. 

“That is really good,” Eduardo says softly.

“You’ve got to call it to order, Mark,” Dustin says.

“Okay, I… I hereby convene the first meeting of the Dead Poets Society, because – because if Welton won’t teach us how to live, we’ll teach ourselves,” Mark says, sounding like he’s improvising, but he grins when everyone nods their agreement. 

He opens his anthology back up and reads what he’d written on the inside cover.

“‘Although they are only breath,’” he says, eyes ticking up to see everyone watching him, eager, strung taut with energy, “‘words which I command are immortal.’ Now you.”

They say it back to him, and Eduardo feels something shift palpably in the air in the cave when they’re done.

“Does anyone have a poem they’d like to share with the class?” Mark asks after a moment, mouth curving up sardonically around the words. 

“I’ve got Catullus,” Chris says. Mark nods appreciatively. Chris clears his throat. “‘Odi et amo—’”

Dustin cuffs him around the head. “This is a no-Latin zone, man.” Chris gives him a rueful look, grinning in spite of himself.

“Fine. Um – ‘I hate and I love. Why do I do this, perhaps you might ask? I do not know – but I feel that it happens and I am tortured.’”

There are a few appreciative murmurs. Dustin claps Chris sympathetically on the shoulder, like he’s just told them about a problem he’s having with a girl. 

Mark is watching all of their faces, his eyes still burning like embers. Eduardo can feel the heat from where he’s sitting a few feet away. 

“Who else?”

And the night passes that way, faster than any night of Eduardo’s life. They lapse into trading lines from the Aeneid for a while (“ _forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit_ – perhaps someday it will be a joy to remember even this”), and Mark spends an hour reading them pieces of Aristophanes’ Assembleywomen, which is so baudy and ridiculous that everyone is red at the tips of their ears and howling with laughter when he’s finished. (“Sex and communism,” Dustin muses, grinning wide. “A winning combination.”) 

They don’t get too close to the heavier stuff Mark had talked about before – the dark, the ecstatic – but somehow it feels fulfilling anyway, huddling around these long-buried words, the funny, the serious, the sad, like a campfire. There’s no plodding recitation, no invocation of meter, no talk of chiasmus or the dative form of the past participle. There’s nothing beyond what they can hear and feel – only words, and each boy speaking them, and the lights in the eyes of everyone else grouped around, like they’re finding a thousand things beyond what they expected. 

English class the next morning is silent and tired and happy. They’re reading Richard II, and everyone smiles into their books, avoiding one another’s eyes. Nolan doesn’t notice a thing.

  


IV.  


  


My song, beyond these Alps  
where skies are more serene and happier,  
you’ll see me by a running brook once more  
where you can sense the aura  
distilling from the fresh and fragrant laurel:  
there is my heart and there is one who steals it;  
what you see here is but the ghost of me.  


  


(Petrarch, Canzoniere 129)   
  


“What about a more recently dead poet?” Divya asks when they’re back in the woods the next week. “Whitman?”

“Sure,” Mark says. He’s sitting up against the gnarl of a tree root in front of the group, looking more at ease than last time. Chris has agreed to be the scribe, and he’s writing down the authors and the titles of the poems they read in the blank pages of Mark’s ancients anthology with the Sappho line and the words _Dead Poets Society – 1959_. 

“It’s from Leaves of Grass,” Divya says. He raises a paperback copy of the book to show everyone, which gets him mostly blank stares, along with a few nods of recognition. 

“I haven’t read it,” Mark says. 

“You should try contemporary sometime,” Divya tells him with a crooked smile. “It’s not all hopeless, this modern stuff.”

“We’ll see,” Mark says. “Go.”

Divya clears his throat, opens his book and reads:

_When I heard the learn’d astronomer;  
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;  
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;  
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,  
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;  
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,  
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,  
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars._

There’s silence for a moment. Eduardo feels kind of sad, suddenly, and he’s not altogether sure why.

“That’s great,” Mark says quietly, at length. Divya looks pleased with himself, and Chris obediently scribbles down the details in the book. 

They’re back in their room, much later that night, lying in bed. Early mornings are getting quieter as the autumn wears on, fewer birds and a chilly hush over the lawns, the presages of frost. 

“I can’t stop thinking about that Whitman bit,” Eduardo says into the silence. He knows Mark’s awake. Despite the low dark, he feels self-conscious about the little catch in his voice.

“Why?” comes Mark’s voice from across the room.

“I don’t want to go to business school,” Eduardo whispers. 

Mark’s sheets rustle, and Eduardo sees the owlish gleam of his eyes come peering at him out of the shadows as he rolls onto his side. 

“So don’t,” Mark says. 

“You don’t know my father,” Eduardo murmurs. 

He imagines he can hear Mark shrugging. “What would you do,” he asks, “if you didn’t go to Harvard?”

“I would go to Stanford,” Eduardo says, laughing quietly in spite of himself, a little gasp of warm air. “And study science.”

“Why do you like it?”

“I just—” he swallows, then turns over too, looking at Mark. He curls his fingers into the sheet at his shoulder. “Does it ever terrify you to think you might die before you understand everything?”

Mark huffs out a laugh. “Everything is a lot of things, Wardo,” he says, but it’s not disdainful. 

“I know,” Eduardo says, half-smiling.

“I think it’s admirable,” Mark says, so quiet Eduardo almost can’t hear him. The words lift at something deep-rooted inside him before he’s even really comprehended them, a weight he hadn’t known was there lightening by a fraction. 

“You do?”

“Yeah,” Mark says. He dithers, apparently, for a moment, and then the words come in a low rush: “I’ve been working on translating the Odyssey for two years.”

“What?”

“I’m on book four. I keep going back over it, it’s going to take forever to finish. But I, I have to.” He wets his lips. “I can’t just read other people’s translations. I have to know it for me. You know?”

“Mark,” Eduardo whispers, as though, in that moment, it’s the only word he knows.

Mark just looks at him evenly, and the moment stretches over them, two boys fallen into something huge and new and subsuming with one another, without having meant to get there and without a shred of desire to go back.

“You’ll be okay,” Mark says after a long time. Comfort seems to feel strange on his lips, but he says the words determinedly, like he thinks Eduardo deserves to hear them, which – it’s different, is all it is, a foreign, sparkling feeling, tugging at Eduardo’s heartstrings.

“I know,” he murmurs, and he actually believes it. “Get some sleep.”

Mark rolls onto his back again. Eduardo listens to his breathing level out slowly in the dark, and he tries not to be scared of whatever this is.

  


V.  


  


There is no better.  
Only (for a short space)  
the night sky like  
a quarantine that sets you  
apart from your task.  


  


Only (softly, fiercely)  
the stars shining. Here,  
in the room, in the bedroom.  
Saying _I was brave, I resisted,  
I set myself on fire._  


  


(Louise Gluck, “Stars”)   
  


The first frost is crackling over the grounds the next time they meet, and Eduardo shrugs into his scarf inside the collar of his heavy wool coat and raises his hand.

“I’ve got Keats,” he says, lifting his paperback and waving it. He doesn’t often speak at these meetings, perhaps because he gets caught up in watching Mark. 

Mark turns his eyes on him in the low light of the cave. Dustin is holding an electric lamp aloft.

“Which?” he says.

“‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.’”

“How apt.” Mark smiles. “The unromantic work of the romantics is underrated.”

“I don’t think it’s unromantic,” Eduardo counters, raising an eyebrow. “It’s just about a book, instead of a person.”

“That’s true,” Mark says. His smile curls into the corners of his mouth, and for one moment Eduardo’s heart trips so badly over itself that he almost sways, but he keeps it together. 

“Shall I?”

“Please.” 

Eduardo licks his lips and cracks the worn spine of his book to the right page. He reads:

_Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,  
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;  
Round many western islands have I been  
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.  
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told  
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;  
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene  
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:  
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies  
When a new planet swims into his ken;  
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes  
He star'd at the Pacific — and all his men  
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise —  
Silent, upon a peak in Darien._

The words ring out into silence in the clammy air, over the watchful faces of the gathered boys, and Eduardo knows they can have no idea who he’s really talking about – that who he’s talking about is really sitting right here with them at the head of the circle, mouthing the last line silently, eyes closed and head bowed as though in prayer.

They’re snaking their way around the edge of the grounds a few hours later, shoes crunching on the grass. The other boys had raced ahead, the newly cold air making everyone hyper, but Eduardo had hung back and so had Mark. 

“That was a good one,” Mark tells him quietly into the silence, “the Keats.”

“Thanks,” Eduardo murmurs, biting his lips. He stops short, then, rocking on the balls of his feet. “Mark – will you come here?”

“What?” Mark pauses and looks back a few paces ahead of him, clutching his anthology close to his chest.

“Will you just come here,” Eduardo says again, his voice rough and small in the night air.

Mark takes a wary step toward him like he’s feeling out a patch of thin ice, and then Eduardo closes the distance between them and pulls him in at the shoulder and kisses him on the lips. 

It's chaste and momentary, though it feels like vertigo, like it lasts forever, and Eduardo's eyes linger closed for a beat when Mark pulls away. He's never felt warmth like this, brimming over despite the chill in the air, the stunning intimacy of someone else's breath so close that it displaces his own.

He smiles a little sheepishly, and opens his eyes. Mark is staring up at him, lips slightly parted.

“Okay?” he asks.

Mark blinks. “Wardo,” he says reproachfully, voice tight and marveling with nervous energy. He reaches out and touches Eduardo’s sleeve fitfully, restless and jittery, like he just can’t abide the lack of contact. Then he leans down and sets his anthology on the ground. Straightening, he tips up into Eduardo’s space again, cups a hand behind his neck and throws his other arm around his shoulders and kisses him again, long and deep, exploratory, his mouth hot on Eduardo’s and the soft slick of the inside of his lip making Eduardo’s chest thrill. He gets his arms around Mark’s thin frame, too, and they tangle together in the October air. 

Mark gasps a little as he pulls away, finally, the cold rushing in between them, and Eduardo holds onto him if only for warmth, his nose at Mark’s temple. 

“No poetry for a moment like this?” Eduardo whispers into his hair.

“I’m working on it,” Mark says. His lips catch Eduardo’s neck as he speaks, and he presses a pensive kiss up under his ear. “I’ve got Sappho, if you want.”

“As usual,” Eduardo says. He shifts back a little so he can look at Mark, all close skin and flushed lips. 

“‘I was so happy, believe me, I prayed that that night might be doubled for us,’” Mark recites, and Eduardo has to close his eyes for a moment, the rush of feeling is so visceral and overwhelming. Mark’s fingers stroke into his hair at the nape of his neck absently.

“You – you really – it’s okay, though?” Eduardo asks stiltedly. He can’t help it, a well-versed mistrust of good things rising to the surface despite his best efforts to tamp it down.

“Yeah, I, yeah,” Mark says, looking at him curiously, and then he grins. “Carpe diem, right?”

Eduardo bites down around a smile. “I think that actually means ‘pluck the day,’” he points out.

“And that is why the Dead Poets Society is better than Latin class,” Mark says, and he punctuates it with a kiss to the corner of Eduardo’s mouth, like it will help solidify the words.

“Mark, on behalf of your inner classicist, I’m scandalized!” Eduardo says, clapping a hand to his heart. 

“He’ll be fine.” Mark waves a dismissive hand. “I knew more than the teacher by the time I was twelve.” And Eduardo laughs, loud and free, even though they’re supposed to be being sneaky.

“Come on,” Mark says, grinning impishly, “it’s goddamn freezing out here.” He hefts his anthology back into his arms and tugs Eduardo by the elbow back toward the steps of the mansion and the warm security of their room.

  


VI.  


  


my blood approves,  
and kisses are a far better fate  
than wisdom  


  


(ee cummings, “since feeling is first”)   
  


The Dead Poets have a bacchanal before Thanksgiving, and it turns out that the best approximation of euphoric, amoral communion with nature and the god that a bunch of 17-year-old boys at boarding school in New England can achieve is basically just a lot of running naked through the woods, whooping lines about Dionysus from Aristophanes’ Frogs and going stark mad with cold and boundless joy.

There are two bottles of wine passed around the circle in the cave beforehand, drunk like a holy libation. Dustin’s lantern flickers artificially in the center, draped with a red handkerchief to set the mood.

They say their Sappho line, an invocation to the great unknown, and feel like they’ve created the most important thing that’s ever been created. 

Back in their room when it’s over, Eduardo nearly knocks over half the furniture trying to get his hands on Mark, both of them clutching sheets half-styled into togas around their shivering bodies. They haven’t done much of anything yet, afraid of nothing but still afraid, but the cold has made them frenzied, reckless, wild, and Eduardo’s got them flush together, the heat of each other a shock and his mouth on Mark’s collarbone before they even turn the lights on. 

Mark trips backwards, his hands clutching at Eduardo’s hips, and falls to the floor with Eduardo following on top of him, all limbs. Mark’s elbow clunks on the hardwood, their legs all tangled up in each other and the knotted bedsheets, and he laughs until it shudders through his body and all the way into Eduardo’s and then they’re just laughing against each other like they can’t believe they get to have happiness like this. 

They never do manage to get the lights on, or even to make it to one of their beds.

After, still lying in a heap on the floor (but warmer now), Eduardo presses his cheek into the plane of Mark’s chest, and then lifts his head to look at him, his flushed face, mouth bitten red. 

“Wardo,” Mark murmurs, turning his nose into Eduardo’s hair and kissing the top of his head, and that’s all he says. Eduardo listens to the beat of his heart in his chest, and closes his eyes.

At Thanksgiving dinner, Eduardo’s father hands him his Harvard application without saying a word. Eduardo swallows thickly, eyes downcast. He takes it up to his room and puts it on his desk, and it looms a vast presence in the room all weekend, chasing his dreams. It’s due at the end of December, and he doesn’t know what to do. 

Mark’s mouth twists when he sees the stack of papers on top of Eduardo’s things inside his suitcase on the first day back. Eduardo’s shoulders slump.

When he looks up, Mark is right in front of him, and he lays his hand on Eduardo’s cheek and kisses him for a long time, soft, their noses slotted easily beside one another.

“Don’t settle for anything less than the greatest thing you can possibly think of,” he says, quiet and emphatic, when they pull apart. Coming from anyone else, it would feel hopelessly trite, but Mark makes it sound like the truest thing Eduardo’s ever heard.

And he thinks, _but I’ve already got him_ , but he knows that’s more dodging the point than it is relevant.

  


VII.  


  


Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns  
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered  
the hallowed heights of Troy…  


  


(Homer, Odyssey Book I)   
  


Just before Christmas break, Dustin tells Mr. Nolan to call him Nuwanda, and that same day they find Chris’ Dead Poets notebook in his desk, and all hell breaks loose.

When Eduardo comes back to his room on the last day of term, it’s to find Mark’s side completely barren, and Mark closing the lid of a box full of books. 

He stops in the doorway, aghast. “Mark,” he says, “what is this?”

Mark turns. He’s wearing a tense kind of bravery on his features, like he’s trying to be strong but is finding it difficult.

“They had to make an example of someone,” he says, a stiff rush of words, “for the Dead Poets Society, I mean, they needed someone to blame or else everyone was going to get in trouble.”

“You didn’t—”

“It was my idea, I mean, I started it, anyway,” Mark says. He lifts his shoulders, that same unapologetic gesture Eduardo’s known since September, but his mouth is sad.

“They expelled you,” Eduardo says quietly. He wants to get the words away from him, like if he ejects them quickly they’ll cease to be true. 

Mark looks down at the floor. 

“You’re leaving?” Eduardo’s voice trembles, high up into his throat. 

“Wardo.” Mark steps over to him easily, puts one hand against his side where his heart shudders inside his ribs, and then the other in the long slope of his shoulder, like they’re going to waltz. 

“You should have let me,” Eduardo says, lips quivering around the words.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Mark snaps, and Eduardo gets then that it’s done and Mark doesn’t want to belabor it, can’t belabor it, or his careful composure will crack. 

“Sorry,” he whispers. Mark leans up and kisses him gently. 

“We did something amazing,” he whispers fiercely against his lips. It sounds like he’s clinging to the words a little to keep from hating this, hating everything about what’s happened. “And it doesn’t have to end.”

He steps back and opens his desk drawer, lifting out a composition book and, beneath it, the anthology with the Dead Poets inscription. He presses them to Eduardo’s chest.

“I can’t—”

“You have to.”

Eduardo sets the anthology down on his desk, folding his hands around the composition book. “What’s this?”

“It’s book one,” Mark says, “of my Odyssey.”

Eduardo looks up at him, lips dropping open.

“Just a copy,” Mark mutters, sheepish. “It’s for you.”

“Mark,” Eduardo murmurs, eyes going soft. So often, it’s the only thing he can think to say. His heart thuds along in his chest, bereaved and overflowing with emotion.

“We’re moving to California next year,” Mark says, “to Palo Alto. Stanford, Wardo, you—you should come out and see me sometime. Come out for school, maybe.”

“Yeah,” Eduardo says. He thinks of his Harvard application, and of Mark murmuring Keats along with him in a cave in the woods – _then felt I like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken._

“Forget your dad,” Mark says, looking into Eduardo’s eyes. “It’s your life. It’s – it’s your brain, and your life and you have an obligation to those things, Wardo, please don’t forget that.”

Eduardo nods. He reaches out and strokes his thumb along Mark’s jaw, marveling at the stark simplicity of the motion, all the little atomic reflexes that go into making the contact feel real, and how amazing it is that he can feel them all so acutely, like they’re the largest and most eternal things that exist.

“Come and see me,” Mark almost whispers. He nuzzles into Eduardo’s hand, their bodies close but not touching at any other point.

“I will,” Eduardo says, like he’s telling it to himself as much as to Mark, and for maybe the first time it doesn’t feel like an empty promise. 

That night, once Mark has gone, Eduardo picks up the composition book off his desk. He opens it to the first page, and begins to read.

  


fin  



End file.
